TV Ad Spending Falling As Digital Rises

The NY Times reports today that "TV will account for 38.4 percent of the $503 billion global ad market this year and will drop to 38 percent of the market in 2016, according to the forecast."  A minuscule number perhaps, but perhaps more a notice of an eventual trend.  Still, with the rise of digital devices, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and more, our attention has steadily moved away from the TV screen and toward the smaller devices.  Mobile is in!  And as we all know, nothing is truly free in this world and content is being paid for mainly by advertising. 

But the digital ads that we get may not be nearly as effective as the television commercials we see.  Sure both are intrusive and too, too many, but the little screens make engagement harder.  Which brings me to a second article in today's NY Times entitled X Marks The Spot.  These pop ups and overlays and screen cloggers make me hate the advertisers that rely on them.  To say they are just a nuisance would be to truly understate how frustrating they are.  No longer comfortable with being banners that rest around the content, these digital ads make getting to the content difficult at best.  Not just that one has to sit through them to get to the content, but that as the article correctly states, trying to click the 'x' to eliminate them becomes a game unto itself. 

But the worst for me is when the pop up ad takes so long to download, creating such a lenghty latency that prevents the actual content from also downloading, that I find myself clicking away from the site.  The more this happens, the more I remember which websites I now avoid altogether, a loss for both publisher and advertiser.  And as others follow on that same path, an eventual loss for the digital industry.  The influx of intrusive advertising will be the means to the industry's self destruction.